The Rambling DBA

While working through my new demos for SQL Server 2016 on Windows Server 2016 I had to rebuild my hyper-converged SQL Failover Cluster environment using local storage and Storage Spaces Direct for the cluster shared storage instead of configuring a iSCSI SAN environment or SMB File Share as I have done in the past. However, […]

My latest article on SQLPerformance.com was published today and highlights the potential for performance problems while using the hot-add vCPU feature in ESX 5+ with wide VMs for SQL Server. http://www.sqlperformance.com/2013/12/system-configuration/vmware-cpu-hot-plug-vnuma-effects-on-sql-server This is a potentially hidden problem with serious performance implications that should be checked for if you are using VMware to run wide VMs […]

I’ve blogged about CPU Ready Time in VMware in the past, and one of the questions I am often asked is whether there is an equivalent counter in Hyper-V? The definition of CPU Ready time by VMware is: “Percentage of time that the virtual machine was ready, but could not get scheduled to run on […]

This month the SQLskills team is presenting a series of blog posts aimed at helping Accidental/Junior DBAs ‘keep the SQL Server lights on’. It’s a little taster to let you know what we cover in our Immersion Event for The Accidental/Junior DBA, which we present several times each year. You can find all the other posts in […]

This month the SQLskills team is presenting a series of blog posts aimed at helping Accidental/Junior DBAs ‘keep the SQL Server lights on’. It’s a little taster to let you know what we cover in our Immersion Event for The Accidental/Junior DBA, which we present several times each year. You can find all the other posts in […]

In my previous post I showed how DBAs can be provided with read-only access to Virtual Center for monitoring VM performance in the data-center One thing that many administrators don’t realize or think about is that Virtual Center uses a database for storing information about the virtual data center and the most common database platform used […]

Most environments using VMware for server virtualization are going to also have Virtual Center Server installed for administration and monitoring. As a DBA, I always had access to Virtual Center with limited permissions. It is incredibly easy for VM administrators to provide read-only access to Virtual Center to non-administrators so that they can monitor the […]

(If you’re having persistent problems with your virtual machine configurations and SQL Server performance, Jonathan can help you fix it – fast! Click here for details.) In the last month I have had to explain how to interpret CPU Ready Time information for SQL Server VMs running on VMware to a number of people. The […]

Recently there was lengthy discussion on the #sqlhelp hash tag on Twitter about clustering SQL Server on VMs and whether or not that was a good idea or not. Two years ago I first blogged about this same topic on my blog post, Some Thoughts on Clustering SQL Server Virtual Machines. If you haven’t read […]

A few weeks back, I needed to make space on my laptop SSDs for some new VMs for future training classes we’ll be doing and as a part of doing this I decided to copy a number of my VirtualBox VMs to an external hard disk. What I had expected was that this would work […]

Traditionally questions about how much memory SQL Server needs were aimed at how to appropriately set the 'max server memory' sp_configure option in SQL Server, and in my book the recommendation that I make is to reserve 1 GB of RAM for the OS, 1 GB for each 4 GB of RAM installed from 4–16 […]

This morning Paul received an email from a member of the community that was asking if it is safe to run SQL Server inside of a VM and whether we would suggest running databases in virtual machines or not. The root of the question being asked was an article that the person had read back […]

On my blog post Virtualizing SQL on VMware Reference List, Oscar Zamora (Blog | Twitter) asked the following question in a comment: As a virtualized instance has the benefit of "failing over" to another physical box, would you consider clustering a virtualized instance? The answer to this question more than I want to write up […]

I’ve been managing SQL Server virtualized in production environments for nearly five years now, and in that time, I’ve had to do a significant amount of reading/learning about VMware as a hypervisor so that I could properly track down performance problems and in a lot of cases, prove to vendors that the problem wasn’t virtualization. […]